Facebook transparency report: 54% of requests produced data

Facebook released its transparency report providing details of government requests that includes copyright, trademark and counterfeit. The text also provided an insight into data and content restrictions alongside internet disruptions.

For India, the data released by Facebook showed that from January 2017-June 2017, there were a total of 9,853 requests and 13,752 user accounts requested. Around 54% of these requests had some data produced. These were mainly legal requests relating to criminal cases.

India’s preservation requests

Content restriction requests in India

‘Facebook restricted access to content in India in response to legal requests from law enforcement agencies and the India Computer Emergency Response Team within the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The majority of content restricted was alleged to violate local laws relating to defamation of religion and hate speech added the company. The number of these requests was 1,228.

Internet disruptions in India

Facebook revealed that there were a total of 21 internet disruption requests throughout the first half of 2017 and in specific regions. The name of the states is not in the report.

Global requests

‘In the first half of 2017, Facebook received 224,464 copyright reports about content on Facebook, 41,854 trademark reports, and 14,279 counterfeit reports,’ read the blog post.

Overall, there was an increase in the requests for account data as compared to the second part of 2016. The percentage increased 21% globally, from 64,279 to 78,890.

57% of the data requests were from US law enforcement contained a non-disclosure order that prohibited us from notifying the user, a rise of 50% from the previous transparency report.

There was an increase of 304% globally on the number of content restrictions, from 6,944 to 28,036. ‘This increase was primarily driven by a request from Mexican law enforcement to remove instances of a video depicting a school shooting in Monterrey in January. We restricted access in Mexico to 20,506 instances of the video in the first half of 2017’ read the report.

The first half of 2017 witnessed 52 Internet disruptions in nine countries, as opposed to 43 disorders in 20 countries in the second half of 2016.